ABSTRACT
With time, the global population and demand for food are increasing proportionally. For example, the projected demand for food and animal feed cereals is going to reach around 3 billion tons by 2050. However, global food production and productivity face various challenges imposed by biotic and abiotic stresses and factors brought upon by climate change. Fortunately, the development of functional genome analysis and genome editing tools has helped researchers understand the genomes and molecular mechanisms of several crop plants that are useful in crop improvement. Although the tools and techniques to determine the function of genes, their products and their interaction have been in use for quite a long time now, the development and advancement of techniques, such as real-time polymerase chain reaction, DNA sequencing techniques more specifically next-generation sequencing, precise genome editing tools, bioinformatics tools, etc., has accelerated the way of performing functional genome analysis. The advancement in techniques to analyze transcriptome, epigenome, proteome, and metabolome has broadened the window to have insight into the complex biological processes both at organismal and cellular level. Aided by advanced genome editing tools, this has led to the design of crop plants with better-yielding capacity along with robust qualities to cope with the adverse environment brought upon by climate change. The chapter aims to discuss the progress in tools and techniques for functional genome analysis along with advancements in genome editing of crop plants.
